In a letter to The Economist (March 1st 2014) Bob Foys from Chicago wrote: “The farm bill passed Congress with the support of urban Democrats and rural Republicans by linking the bloated food-stamps programme with scandalously wasteful agricultural subsidies (“A trillion in the trough”, The Economist, February 8th). The huge cost of this exercise provides evidence for M. Stanton Evans’s observation that in America there are only two parties: “One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party…Occasionally the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.”